


The bells of hell

by Naraht



Series: The bells of hell [3]
Category: North Face - Mary Renault, Purposes of Love - Mary Renault, Return to Night - Mary Renault, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Class Issues, F/M, Gen, Hospitals, Medical Procedures, Sexism, Sexual Harassment, Surgeons, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-07-11 08:34:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7041007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dunkirk and the Blitz shake Bridstow City Hospital, while inside the hospital a war of the sexes rages.</p><p>For Hilary nothing is more important than passing her Fellowship exams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_May 1940_

Hilary was thirty-six. Hopelessly behindhand. 

Not having begun her training until after university, nor qualified till she was twenty-nine, she had been behind from the start, and now she was still studying for her Fellowship. Those years as a GP had cost her dearly; if it had not been for the war she would never have had the chance to resume her surgical career. The question of whether or not one ought to feel grateful for such things would have exercised her mind if she had not been too tired to wonder.

After her lengthy shifts at Bridstow City Hospital she drowsed over her texts, feeling too old to be a student again, too old for anything but sleep. A war which had begun with excitement had continued as an irritant and a trial, suspense drawn out beyond endurance, nearly a year already gone. She wished that something would happen already. She wished that it would just be over. Most of all she wished that whatever did happen would pass September by, for that was to be the date of her Fellowship exam.

Old Morgan, the senior consultant surgeon, had retired a few weeks earlier, finally unable to deny the effects of a chronic bronchitis that had developed into emphysema. He had spent a good portion of February as an inpatient himself with pneumonia - it was Hilary's private opinion that he never would have survived it before M&B - and after that, despite his recovery, he had never been able to fully resume even the relatively leisurely pace of a consultant.

A good portion of the work had fallen on Hilary's shoulders - mere MB BCh MRCS though she might be - and she had been happier than anyone to hear of the appointment of a new honorary who would be taking over Morgan's firm.

"I hear he's rather young," said Hilary's house surgeon one afternoon, while they were together performing a routine appendectomy. "For an honorary anyway. Forty-five or so."

This came oddly from a young man of twenty-six, but de Groot was the son of one of the hospital governors, and one could assume that anything he reported had been on his father's lips the evening before. He never made so much of the connection as to make himself obnoxious, only enough for it to be known - and he was generally considered to be the best source of gossip in the surgical wards.

"Mmm?" responded Hilary, attempting to hide her interest.

"Thrusting type. Father was impressed; he likes that sort. Spent most of the last year doing some sort of hush-hush research - for the MoD, one imagines - but decided he didn't like it after all and chucked it in."

Hilary said wryly, "One hopes he won't be bored with us."

"He could have gone where he liked but father promised him a free hand here. And who would pass up the chance at Morgan's private practice? I hear he sold up at a knock-down price, he thought so much of this chap."

Hilary doubted that she would ever see such bounty. "I wouldn't. We'll see, I suppose. Close up, please."

***

The new honorary would be taking up his post on the first of June, but his ceremonial arrival came two days earlier.

The way was prepared for him in the foyer by a reception committee of hospital governors, honorary surgeons, university lecturers and other assorted dignitaries. Hilary, obliged to spend a precious forty-five minutes trailing the welcome party around the hospital from ward to laboratory, was brought back to her student days, recalling endless rounds where, being a few inches shorter than most of her fellow students, she had too often found herself unable to see the patient at all. Now, a mere surgical registrar, she ranked somewhat below the hospital Matron in dignity; while the latter had merited a brief but complete introduction, she had to console herself with brief, curious glimpses of her new chief's close-curled, wiry hair or the emphatic gesture of a hand.

Patients and staff alike were all on their dignity. Even the ordinary rounds of the consultant surgeons meant hushed attention and meticulous preparation, bedsheets smoothed and tucked around the patients as crisply as if they had been ironed and starched only moments before. No one dared to interrupt a consultant on his progress; today the preparations had been even more meticulous.

But there was a buzz about the hospital that had nothing to do with the arrival of one new general surgeon. For days now the hospital had been on alert for the arrival of war casualties, though when, and whence, had not been generally vouchsafed. It was increasingly rumoured that the war was going more badly in France than the official news reports had acknowledged; even Hilary, who made a point of not crediting war rumours and in any case had neither the time nor the energy to devote to their analysis, had begun to think that perhaps, this time, there might be something in it.

In the wards that day there had been a growing, unspecific, febrile excitement among the patients, rumour and nerves reaching a pitch that had vexed the nurses to distraction as they prepared for the arrival of the new honorary.

To Hilary's immense surprise she found that the atmosphere persisted even after his arrival. Just as the party was leaving one of the women's surgical wards she, at the rear of the procession, heard a radio being switched on. This was highly irregular; her head snapped round at the sound of the BBC newsreader and she caught the eye of the ward sister. Fisher, whom Hilary had always liked, came quickly forward.

"Sorry, Mrs Fleming. Only the news had already started before you came in. They've evacuated the BEF. They're bringing the boys home."

 _So that's what it is,_ thought Hilary.

"Well, you still ought to have waited," she said mechanically, and then ran to catch up with the group.

In the next ward there was better discipline; hushed silence prevailed. Hilary looked around for de Groot, thinking that she might pass the news in a whisper, but she could not see him and suspected him of having worked his way towards the front, to his father's side. There was no one else to tell. To have made an announcement to the assembled dignitaries would have been beyond gauche; even if London had fallen it would have been unthinkable.

So she said nothing at all. For the past months the war had been nothing but an annoyance, most important in that it separated her from Julian, a threat dulled through repetition into weary resignation. Hilary knew and had seen death at first hand. For her there was nothing theoretical about that. What was unimaginable for her about war was its scale. For the past few months she had done her best not to think about it, telling herself that there was no utility in abstract contemplation, burying herself in the day-to-day life of the hospital. Now it seemed that the two worlds were about to come into collision and a feeling of fizzing, unsettling excitement was beginning to sink into her bones. She felt a sudden rush of blood; she knew she was flushing, the too-frequent curse of her pale skin.

From the front of the party she was now catching only a few scattered phrases: "very good... new firm... of course you'll want... your assistants," and then from the midst of what had degenerated in her ears into scattered babble, she caught her own name. The crowd had parted; both de Groot and Carter, the firm's other consultant, were looking back towards her.

Hilary stepped forward, thinking how silly it seemed all of a sudden.

"May I introduce the firm's registrar, Mrs. Hilary Fleming," said the head of surgery. She had not known that he knew her name. "Mrs Fleming, this is Mr. Scot-Hallard."

"How do you do," said Hilary.

Feeling his assessing gaze upon her, Hilary had no compunction about returning his scrutiny. She had no illusions about how she must appear in his eyes: a woman some years into middle age, dressed in sensible tweeds and crepe-soled shoes, wearing no more than a trace of powder and some lipstick hastily applied in the seconds before the arrival of the welcome party.

"How do you do," he said simply in reply, but there was an overtone of gallantry to his voice, a slight bow of the head, that would have been more appropriate for a greeting such as _charmed, I'm sure_.

Hilary wondered whether anyone had bothered to tell him that his registrar was a woman. A moment later she concluded that there was no way to know: his composure would have remained as complete, and his manner as assured, whether or not he had possessed advanced knowledge of the fact. She was suddenly reminded of David, but found the association an unwelcome one and put it out of her mind.

Scot-Hallard had gathered around him the members of his own firm: Carter, the assistant surgeon; Hilary herself; and de Groot and Harrison, the house surgeons. He discoursed to them for a few moments, not small talk, but soliciting their opinions about the coming effects of the war upon surgical practice. Though he must have been conscious, as Hilary was herself, of the fact that the hospital governors and his fellow honoraries were awaiting him, for there was a welcome dinner awaiting them, he gave no impression of being rushed. He had, in fact, the talent of the successful diplomat - or seducer - for making his audience feel as if they were the only ones who mattered.

Hilary caught only a mere flicker of his attention before she noticed that someone had come up to Carter and was speaking to him in confidential terms.

"Casualty's spent the last twenty minutes buzzing for us," said Carter with a wry, slightly nervous amusement. "There's a hospital train arriving at Temple Meads in three hours. Full readiness; all the theatres to be opened, even the temporary ones."

"The BEF is being evacuated from France," put in Hilary, having finally found the right occasion for the news. She was ashamed to find that her heart was thumping in her chest. "It was just on the radio. This must be the first wave."

"Well," said Scot-Hallard. "Dunkirk. So they've finally lifted the news blackout."

The name was unfamiliar to Hilary, conjuring up only vague pictures of a seaside holiday resort. But she was not surprised to hear that her new chief was privy to more information than the general public.

It was not her firm's week for taking-in. After greeting the new honorary, Hilary had expected to perform her night rounds and then go off-duty. The consultants and assorted dignitaries would be departing for a lavish dinner at the Palm Court in the Royal Hotel, to which she was - naturally - not invited. The only maladies that consultants would be treating tonight were overindulgence, gout, and alcoholic excess.

"Three hours?" added Scot-Hallard easily. "Ample time for dinner, wouldn't you agree, Mr. Carter? With your permission, Mrs Fleming, I'll scrub in with you tonight."

"Of course," said Hilary.

It was not as if the resident staff would be unable to cope with the influx. Fully mobilised, with medical students assisting, they could keep all the theatres - plus the temporary space which had been readied in the basements in preparation for just this eventuality - running at full capacity. They would work through the night, no doubt, stand ready for the consultants making their rounds in the morning, and then carry on working. This Hilary accepted without question. The hospital was a mighty beast, immense and unstoppable in its inertia; its running would not be disarranged by anything so trivial as wartime.

Scot-Hallard, too, would be absorbed as a matter of course into the smooth running of the hospital. But in the mean time he seemed determined to make his mark.

"Until then," he said, with a look of anticipation.

***

Hilary stood in the surgical anteroom, meticulously scrubbing up; beside her Scot-Hallard was doing the same.

The intervening three hours she had spent in a whirlwind of activity: agreeing plans with the casualty officers and the other surgical residents, seeing that patients were moved or quickly discharged from the surgical wards, checking the theatres to be certain that everything was ready. When Scot-Hallard had strolled in once again, still clad in his dinner jacket as through he were off to a different sort of theatre, she had been having a quick and much needed cigarette and felt rather caught in the act. Only a few minutes later they had been rung by Casualty with the news that the first of the patients had arrived. On the strength of five minutes acquaintance Hilary half suspected him of having timed his arrival intentionally but she could not see how he had done it.

After a bare minute's sojourn in the men's changing-room he had emerged more appropriately clad for surgery, stripped down to the essentials. Like Sanderson, he favoured a sleeveless top - in the event she suspected that he had been wearing it under his dress shirt - and, like Sanderson, it served to highlight the muscular development of his arms. Hilary, whom in theatre occasionally felt the need for more upper body strength than she possessed, was mildly jealous.

"I had to excuse myself from the port and stilton," he observed, soaping his arms to the elbow. "But I wouldn't have missed this for the world. Have you any experience of military medicine, Mrs Fleming?"

 _How could I have?_ thought Hilary and fiercely attacked her nails - as closely cut as his own - with the scrubbing brush. But all she said was, "no, Mr. Scot-Hallard."

"I started off as a Medical Officer in the RAMC - right at the end of the last war." She noted how neatly he had specified, lest she retain a misapprehension that he were four years older than he actually was. "Baptism of fire in many ways - I came in during the Spring Offensive - but there seems to be no substitute for gaining a sound understanding of trauma. In polite company one oughtn't to admit to nostalgia for the front."

Hilary could only suppose that he did not consider her to be polite company. She lost a few moments pondering whether or not this should be counted as a compliment.

"I'll take the abdominal cases," he continued, shutting off the tap with his elbow, "if they've had the goodness to forward us any from Dover. You'll take the extremities."

It was not a question. Nonetheless she nodded her agreement. One could only have demurred from such an assignment by pleading lack of confidence or lack of ability - and, with such a man as Scot-Hallard seemed to be, if one did, one would be finished, permanently and irrevocably.

"When in doubt, amputate," Scot-Hallard said. "Don't be shy. I don't doubt we'll be seeing sepsis by now."

"I'm not shy," said Hilary.

Though the basement theatre was illuminated by unromantic, practical Zeiss lamps, there was something unearthly in the intensity of their glow, the contrast with the dead blackness of night beating against the high, un-curtained windows. Hilary stood blinking away the fatigue and the glare of the light, her hands held ready. The first patient was wheeled in; another followed, and then another. She operated all night, a constant flow during which one case blurred into the next. 

But there was a simplicity about surgical work that was satisfyingly perceptible even at a time such as this. Having been a casualty officer she could imagine the chaos reigning downstairs: unsterile, un-regimented, a tide of exhausted, dirty men that had reached all the way from the shores of France, across the Channel, and flowed finally into Bridstow casualty. Stretcher cases being carried in; the walking wounded loitering in clumps, smoking cigarettes and telling tales. Here the patients told no tales: anaesthetised and draped, they were as anonymous as they must have been, once, when smartly turned-out on the parade ground.

She performed debridements and sutured wounds and ran transfusions - every donor in Bristol must have been roused from their beds to meet the demand. She did three amputations, reckoned by patients; six as reckoned by extremities, for one man lost both legs to sepsis, one a hand, and another two and a half fingers.

The slowly creeping dawn made no impression against the brilliantly lit surgical table. It was only the brilliant, early summer daylight that had her looking up in surprise at a clear blue sky. Tomorrow, she remembered irrelevantly, would be the first day of June.


	2. Chapter 2

Most of the patients from the hospital train, Hilary later learned, had been forwarded to the EMS hospital in Winford. To Bridstow had been left only the most serious cases and a scattering of officers, who were presumed to require accommodation more genteel than Winford's hastily assembled prefabricated huts. 

Within a few days' time a scattering of stabilised cases had been transferred to Winford; this, along with the inevitable deaths, brought the tenancy of the surgical wards down to a once again manageable number. The beds were brought in from the corridors and life went on.

Hilary now had the chance to get to know her patients as names and faces, rather than histories taken down at speed from casualty; to familiarise herself, ironically, with their exteriors rather than their insides. They were mainly Army men with a smattering of Navy. She thanked heavens that there was no one from the RAF, for it would only have made her think of Julian, who had written to her longingly of flying in France. Selfishly she hoped that he would never be given the chance. And while she was on duty in hospital she preferred to forget that she was a married woman.

With Scot-Hallard at the head of the firm, morning rounds now proceeded at such a brisk pace that Hilary, and others no less, occasionally was pressed into a half-run. Here there was no time for personal inquiries. Her night rounds, by contrast, were hers alone, to be conducted at her own pace and to her own priorities.

"And how are they settling in?" she asked the ward sister over a politic initial cup of tea.

Hilary had come to like Fisher, whose competent straightforwardness left little need for the delicate handling which other sisters and matrons had demanded.

"Not so badly. Very polite boys; happy to be back home, and no surprise. The only one who's been the slightest bit of trouble is the friend of Mr. Deacon."

"Friend of Mr. Deacon?" echoed Hilary.

"Yes," said Miss Fisher. "The finger amputation."

This brought the case to Hilary's mind immediately. He had been brought in towards the end of the night, one of the less urgent patients. Ambulatory all the way to casualty but, from the sight of his drawn and blanched face on the table, Hilary had surmised that it was a matter of sheer adrenalin. After pouring a pint of blood into him she had turned her attention to his smashed left hand. There was a question of how much could be saved, but casualty had ascertained that he was right-handed, and in the end she had taken off the index and ring finger along with the middle finger at the knuckle. The fifth metacarpal might yet go; there she had chosen to watch and wait. Scot-Hallard would let it be known if he wished to involve orthopaedics.

"Why," said Hilary, "what's he done?"

"Mr. Deacon came in only the morning after to see him. He said, _look after him but keep an eye on him. He'll try to get up, see if he doesn't._ And he has - twice today." She spoke with a sort of pride, as though in testament to Alec's diagnostic skills. Alec was always popular among the nurses. "He's not as well as he thinks he is. A touch feverish still, heart rate rapid; it's all in the chart."

"I shall have a word with him," Hilary said, with a satisfied briskness that took her by surprise.

During her time as a GP the idea of patients silent and anaesthetised had exerted a curious fascination over her; now that her responsibilities were mostly surgical, she suddenly welcomed the chance to speak with them. Perhaps her sojourn as a GP had made its mark after all. Or perhaps she was just curious about this friend of Alec Deacon's.

According to his chart the finger amputation was _Lanyon, Lieutenant R.R._ , a fair-haired young man who lay on his back under the counterpane as neatly as if he had been laid out, with only the shallow movement of his chest suggesting animation. Despite the pint of blood he did not look all that much better than he had done in surgery. He was slight to the point of suggesting frailty, though one did not imagine that a Navy officer would have any excuse for being frail. One would have thought, Hilary reflected, that they would have decently hearty meals on board a battleship.

She was about to speak and wake him when his eyelids snapped open of their own accord. "Yes?" 

Despite his supine position the tone carried a suggestion of command, as if she were reporting to him on the bridge of a ship.

Hilary smiled, amused. At least he had not called her _Nurse_. "I'm the registrar. How are you feeling this evening?"

"Alive. Under the circumstances very lucky."

"Yes, rather." She glanced at the chart. "Any pain?"

"None to speak of."

She did not believe him. Scot-Hallard had - rather prematurely, in her opinion - ordered the morphine titrated down that morning. But she let it pass.

"I'll just take this dressing off," she continued, "and..."

"They've changed it already today."

"My house surgeon changed it this morning, yes," said Hilary, unable to keep a note of impatience out of her voice. "And now I'm taking it off so that I can have a look at your hand and see whether there's any sign of infection."

"Right," said Lanyon fatalistically. "Well, if you must."

Hilary belatedly thought that she ought to have been rather gentler with him; underneath the lines of strain, one could see that he was after all very young, perhaps even younger than Julian. If Julian were lying wounded in a hospital somewhere... but this was a thought that she quickly denied herself before it could be allowed to take hold.

"Lie still, my dear," she said, a comforting tone which had come more naturally to her over the past two years through greater practice. "I shall be as quick as I can."

This hardly seemed to help. Lanyon lay stoically motionless as she examined her handiwork; she could sense the unnatural rigidity of his body, a sense of muscular effort as though he had been asked to remain at attention, prolonged beyond endurance. It seemed rather overdone to her; apart from the fifth metacarpal, which still seemed rather in doubt, his hand was getting on well.

"There," she said. "That wasn't so bad, wasn't it?"

She might as well have been auditioning for the part of Ward Sister, and she had her doubts as to whether the boy deserved it. He only gave her a world-weary look that suggested she had asked him to pronounce a verdict on the troubles of the globe and all the ills to which flesh was heir.

"You know I shan't be able to go back to active service now," he said, in a dully conversational tone as though he were passing a commonplace on the weather. "Not with two and a half fingers gone."

The policies of the Royal Navy had formed no part of Hilary's training. She had not known them; nor would they have formed a consideration if she had. In the early hours of the morning, having worked for twenty hours straight, she had done what she considered medically necessary. Quickly reviewing the case in her mind, she knew that she would do the same again, for sentiment could hardly play any role in the decisions of a surgeon. 

Nonetheless she had felt a moment of sickening doubt, the giddy drop that calls every foundation of one's judgment into question.

"I'm sorry to hear that," she said, bringing herself under control again. "But I can assure you that you would have found the alternatives even worse."

He studied her with those pale, blue eyes, a polite, hopeless mistrust that was difficult to face without flinching. Outright hate would have been simple by comparison.

"I'll have the nurse give you something to sleep," added Hilary.

After writing a prescription for Luminal she fled the ward, telling herself that the troublesome R. R. Lanyon ought to be thanking fate - and herself - that he had pulled through at all. She went to have a cigarette in the residents' common room and put the case out of her mind.

***

"No push," said Scot-Hallard, taking his leave of Carter after morning rounds. "Ergo won't get anywhere."

Hilary, who had just gone to the lodge to check her post, was struck by this pronouncement, which had been uttered in tones more suitable for the stage than for a quiet tête-à-tête. One could not have accused Scot-Hallard of lacking in push. Even during this brief exchange he was unable to keep still, shifting his weight restlessly and pushing his toe against the foyer's tiled floor. Feigning absorption in a drug circular and a notice for a conference of the Medical Women's Federation that she would certainly not attend, she listened unobtrusively to discover which member of staff her chief was eviscerating today.

"Too much push, I would have thought. All the nurses think she's a first-rate bitch."

Scot-Hallard shook his head emphatically. "Practically forty. Still a resident. Hasn't even taken a Fellowship exam, let alone passed - isn't that right?" He left a pause which was barely adequate for Carter to make an affirmative noise. "At some point one simply has to be realistic and shove off for general practice. Overdue in this case, clearly. I suppose she expected to retire once the babies started coming along. And then they didn't."

"She hasn't been married over a year, I think," said Carter, attempting to soften this second contradiction with fixed attention to the packing of his pipe. "Her husband is very young. In the RAF. He was the talk of the hospital Christmas party last year."

"Mmm." Scot-Hallard paid this little mind, continuing along his own lines. "There's the war as well. Public spirited, perhaps? It's not that she's not good; just the opposite, or she could be, with a bit of application. But that's the waste of women in medicine. They never live up to the promise."

Carter expressed agreement and the two men parted without further ceremony, leaving Hilary in shocked silence, the sweat that had prickled her palms soaking into the circular.

She could spare no gratitude for the compliment to her abilities; she could hardly credit it. All she felt was white hot rage, of a kind that she had last experienced with David. Her anger at Mrs. Fleming had faded with time - and with her own victory - but this fury was evergreen.

She must pass her Fellowship. She must; she would. She would show them all.

At the end she remembered that she had been looking for a letter from Julian, which had not yet arrived. It hardly seemed to matter now.

***

Scot-Hallard's words smarted for the rest of the day. Hilary went about her tasks at an uncompromising pace - one might have called it punishing, though she would not have thought to do so. Seizing every opportunity to strike terror into the nurses and the medical students, she told herself that she was merely taking the reins, as she ought to have done long before. If by efficiency she could squeeze a few minutes out of the day for study, so much the better. She took every flight of stairs at double pace while trying to drill herself on syphilis of the liver, and in the end found herself only harassed, perpetually distracted, and with blisters coming up on her heels despite her sensible crepe-soled shoes.

She grasped at the banister on the landing outside the men's general surgical ward, trying to catch her breath before showing her face there. Blotting at her forehead with a handkerchief, she thought that she could do with seeing to her makeup as well, but there was hardly the time. What she really wanted was a cigarette: in her hurry she had scanted herself, and perhaps this contributed to her feeling of agitated exhaustion.

If she could just get ahead of things, perhaps she could allow herself twenty minutes peaceful revision with a cigarette in the residents' common room. Hilary smiled at the prospect. She had not had dinner but this hardly seemed to matter by comparison.

Stepping into the ward she found everything in uproar.

"Lieutenant _Lanyon_ ," the little probationer nurse was exclaiming, wringing her hands, and doing nothing whatsoever about the fact that Lanyon, R.R. was out of bed and halfway across the ward. Seeing Hilary enter, she put her hand over her mouth, and stared at Hilary rather than her patient.

Hilary got as far as "what on earth..." before concluding that this was no time to stand upon her dignity. She stepped forward quickly and took Lanyon hard by his upper arms.

"You're meant to be in bed," she said, not that anyone could have been in doubt about the fact.

Lanyon replied through gritted teeth, betokening not anger but physical effort. His face was dead white and he swayed slightly in her grasp. "I'm only... going... to the toilet."

"No. You're going straight back to bed."

Before his injury, even below his fighting weight as he was, Lanyon would unquestionably have been the stronger. Now there was no contest. Holding him firmly, she guided him back to his bed, perhaps slightly less gently than she might have done if she had been feeling more generous towards the world. If her handling was rather rough, it was motivated primarily by a sense of urgency - for he seemed close to fainting and she did not trust herself to catch him if he fell. The pleasure she took in enforcing her will upon him was neither here nor there.

His jaw set, Lanyon looked up while she straightened the sheets round him. "I'm hardly on death's door."

"Is that your medical opinion?"

"I'm not a doctor, no. But when one serves on small ships... someone has to take the responsibility. It's always been me. So I've seen far worse."

"Mmm. So have I." Hilary took the opportunity to light a cigarette. She took a deep drag and blew a cloud of smoke in his direction. "Only I _am_ a doctor, and, like it or not, you're my responsibility. If you won't stay in in bed and eat what's put in front of you, I'll order you an IV drip and a Foley. And I'll fit them both myself, right now."

The prospect of a catheter seemed to focus his mind sufficiently that there was no need to mention restraints. He need not know that she had done this before his surgery, nor that it was a task so routine that she could recall nothing whatsoever of the relevant portion of his anatomy.

"Would you like my name, rank and serial number as well?"

Under other circumstances one might have taken it as a light joke, conjured up to break the tension. He might even have intended it as such, but if there was a glint of humour in his pale eyes she did not notice.

"You're taking time away from patients who need me more," she snapped. "Do I need to call Alec Deacon up here to get it into your head?"

That got through. For a moment anyway.

"No," he said flatly. "That won't be necessary. I know enough to behave myself."

One could have imagined that he had just been told the war was over for him. There was the same feeling of senseless defeat, constrained half courtesy offered because there was no other option, of _pro forma_ resentment turning through familiarity to loathing. Or perhaps she was projecting.

To conjure up the spectre of sex war in a hospital ward seemed unconscionable under the circumstances, given the more tangible war that raged outside. Hilary felt a sudden rush of hot shame. The young man was defenceless and under her power. By the standards of post-operative patients he had hardly behaved badly; as he was in no position to challenge her authority, she had no excuse for acting as if he had done so. She had simply taken against him, and for no reason besides her own insecurities.

_The shrillness of an inferiority complex,_ David would have observed, correctly. No doubt Scot-Hallard would say the same. She hoped to God that he never heard about this little contretemps.

_A first rate bitch,_ she imagined Lanyon saying to Alec Deacon after she had gone. This shook her, because she valued Alec's opinion, and she found herself hoping that Lanyon would have the decency not to complain to him.

***

It was, as it happened, a forlorn hope.

"I hear that my friend has been making a nuisance of himself," said Alec apologetically, lingering by the entrance to the housemen's common room with his hands in the pockets of his white coat. During his surgical rotation he had been one of Hilary's own students. The _contretemps_ that had ensued when he unknowingly attempted to pick Julian up in a Bridstowe pub had embarrassed Alec, but amused Hilary, and brought them in the end closer together. Now, though he had moved on to casualty, they still spoke occasionally when they met in the corridors. 

"Lanyon?" said Hilary, as neutrally as she could. "Who told you that? Sister?"

"No, he told me himself. He has rather a guilt complex about taking up a bed; that's what caused the trouble in the first place. He's got this idea that he's a waste of space. One can't talk him out of it."

"Sounds like a case for a psychiatrist," Hilary replied, though this was not what she had been intending to say at all.

Alec lifted his head and stared at her. Then he laughed. "I shouldn't wonder. Only there's not a hope in hell of getting him there. Ralph at a trick cyclist? London will disappear into the sea sooner. He barely talks to me, not that I'm any substitute."

One ought here to insert some admonition about the unqualified meddling in what they did not understand, but Hilary felt her own grasp of psychiatry somewhat tenuous. She could not think of the field now without remembering herself confidently galloping a horse towards a blind drop. It had nearly killed her, and the horse besides; the fact that it had worked seemed beside the point. It ought not to have done.

_Perhaps Julian ought to see a psychiatrist,_ she thought, and then dismissed the idea as absurd.

"You could be, in a few years."

At this he studied her still more closely. Then he looked away and lit a cigarette. "Oh, I'm going into surgery. If your lot will have me, that is."

"I've no doubt of that," said Hilary.

It was no more than the truth. Yet whether she would still be counted as one of 'our lot' then remained to be seen. Privately she acknowledged that a failure in the Fellowship would drive her out for good. Whatever one might say about the value of resitting, it was a young man's game, in all senses. To have failed, and to have it publicly known - which of course it would be, most likely within hours of the result - would be unbearable. No salve to her pride could possibly make up for it.

_Better to reconcile oneself to the idea early._

"No doubt at all," she repeated, in order to cover the awkward silence that had fallen.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," said Alec, with the graceful modesty of a young man who feels he really does not need one. "Well, I suppose they'll be wanting me in casualty. I'll have a word with Ralph later, not that I think it'll do much good."

"Don't. Not about that."

He raised an eyebrow. "About you? No, of course not."

"It hardly matters," said Hilary.


	3. Chapter 3

After overhearing Scot-Hallard's opinion of her competence – or lack thereof – Hilary had assumed that her next encounter with him would be filled with excruciating self-consciousness. In this she had reckoned without Scot-Hallard himself, who, much like David, possessed an unquestionable talent for making himself at ease in any social situation that presented itself. He had not, of course, been aware that Hilary was listening to his conversation with Carter, but even if he had known it one could not imagine it making any difference. He would have treated the situation with the same imperturbable assurance with which he treated the rest of his life, as though he could not imagine any possibility of discomfiture.

When he greeted her in the anaesthesia room Hilary was certain she was blushing. He did not attempt to make conversation, but began immediately to discuss the upcoming surgery. She was grateful for this, to an almost embarassing degree which partially erased the fury she had felt at his initial transgression. This fact unsettled her in its own way, but the demands of surgery allowed her to put all of that out of her mind.

They worked well together, as well as Hilary and Sanderson had done – better, in fact, for Hilary's skills had improved despite the lapse of time, and Scot-Hallard gave more scope to a registrar than he would have done with a mere house surgeon. Unlike Sanderson he was not an innovator in the theatre; few would remember or note his name in another fifty years' time. He was merely an extraordinarily good general surgeon. In his sphere, his operations were as deft and as uncompromisingly rapid as Sanderson's had been, and they left Hilary pleasurably pressed to keep up.

It was a successful operation. The patient survived his time on the table, which had been by no means certain, and could be expected to thrive thereafter.

After changing, Scot-Hallard and Hilary lingered in the anteroom, discussing the surgery in terms which were ostensibly clinical, but really a sort of quiet self-congratulation. It carried on long enough that Hilary found herself unconciously checking her watch, thinking that she would need to be off on her duties soon. It was a mistake.

"Shall we continue this over dinner tomorrow evening?" Scot-Hallard asked, as easily as if he had been asking her opinion of the prognosis.

Hilary, certain for a moment that she had misheard, was struck dumb.

"You aren't obliged to say yes," he pursued, as pleasantly as before. "Far from it. But there are far more congenial places to pass the time, even in these straitened days of rationing. And I suppose you've enough experience of the world to realise that you deserve better than hospital food."

As a compliment this was a risky business, alluding as it did to her age. But it appealed also to her image of herself as a woman of experience, and for this reason it could be considered well judged.

Having spent her whole adult life in medicine, Hilary had long ago become inured to being propositioned. Allowing oneself to be put off by it would be foolish, like a fourth-former deciding to swear off public school once and for all. Patients, housemen, and, on one memorable occasion, one of the porters – all of them had tried their luck, as if there were not nurses available in abundance. One of them, namely David, had even succeeded.

But she had never been propositioned by Sanderson. At the time she had thought rather seriously about what she would do if he did make the attempt, and had realised ashamedly, a few months into her relationship with David, that she had rather been hoping he would. It was months after that when she learned that the omission was no personal slight; she was simply, and rather emphatically, not his type. Ossian Bradford, on the other hand...

Hilary smiled to think of it, and then wished she had not, for it meant that she was smiling up at Scot-Hallard.

"That's..." she began, fully intending to follow with _very good of you but I couldn't possibly_.

"I know a very good country hotel," he added. "A blank spot on the map to every other member of the hospital staff, I assure you. The food also happens to be excellent."

Her stomach grumbled in sympathy at the thought, for she had not had time to eat before scrubbing in. 

She supposed, also, that refusing to go to dinner with him might put the final nail in the coffin of her surgical ambitions. A resident who lacked the push to seize upon a dinner invitation from her chief might also be considered to lack the push to succeed in surgery. Considered in this light, she could hardly turn him down.

_I suppose he's taken Carter to dinner already,_ she thought impatiently. _Ought I to be left out simply because I'm a woman?_

***

Scot-Hallard was as good as his word. 

The half-timbered Cotswold inn to which he drove her, though it was near on halfway to Lynchwick, was one of which she had never heard. She could not think that any other member of the surgical staff would be better informed. When would they have had the time to discover it? When, for that matter, had Scot-Hallard? He had been in Bridstow less than a month and one imagined that he had to sleep occasionally. Nonetheless she had no doubt that he had thrown himself into dining out with the same energy he applied to every other aspect of his life.

So Hilary mused as they crossed the threshold of the building. It was a moment before she realised that Scot-Hallard was waiting to take her coat.

He was, as he had been throughout the drive, at pains to make himself agreeable as a man. He helped her out of her coat as gracefully as one could have asked – thought Hilary, conscious of the ripped lining in one sleeve – and stood just close enough that one could catch the scent of a cologne not perceptible over the carbolic of hospital. So, too, he pulled out her chair for her with a courtliness only slightly diminished by its obvious self-consciousness.

All of this had a peculiar effect on Hilary. She had not had her womanhood appealed to so notably since – since she had last seen Julian, one might say. Nonetheless, to be looked to as a goddess, or even, occasionally, as a mother, was not quite the same thing, and his lack of self-consciousness had always been one of Julian's charms. 

In the eyes of Scot-Hallard, despite her age and her unlikely occupation, she had now become a woman. Or perhaps she always had been one, and he had merely been too polite to show that he noticed.

_And all because he wants to sleep with me,_ she thought. _What fools men are._

She was not so foolish herself as to fail to notice the sense of power this gave her. It was a deceptive one, for one could come to expect it, depend upon it – and then, when one turned to it in extremity, find that it could not be relied upon. But all this seemed distinctly moot, and indeed rather churlish, when considered across a restaurant table with a good bottle of red wine between them. (He had, she reminded herself, ordered it without consulting her.)

"Another glass?" he asked, seeing her gaze lingering upon the bottle, and poured it out for her. "A good Malbec Bordeaux. One wonders how long it will be before we see a new vintage."

Scot-Hallard presented this as a purely factual observation; he never made any other kind.

"I wish the Germans much joy of it," he added. "Though I don't imagine that it will keep them there for long."

His voice expressed a certain relish at the thought of the coming fight. It was an emotion which Hilary could not share.

Perhaps sensing a constraint descending upon the conversation, Scot-Hallard picked up another topic. Or at least one assumed he believed it to be another topic; for Hilary it was all much of a muchness.

She had not known that he was a pilot. He had become fascinated by the idea during the last war, so he said: the air war had been by far the most interesting part of the Spring Offensive, and one could see at the time that here was where the future of warfare lay.

"Alongside chemical weapons, naturally," he added as an afterthought. "But they offer fewer recreational possibilities."

It had not been until the late twenties, he continued, that he finally joined a flying club and got himself into the cockpit of a De Havilland Gipsy Moth. 

"And I enjoyed it so much that I bought myself a Leopard Moth in '36. A fine touring plane with a much higher service ceiling. Nothing can compare to the sensation of flying at 20,000 feet. I should very much like to share the experience with you; unfortunately she was impressed into state ownership at the very start of the war. There's something wounding to a man's pride when the state demands his belongings before his own service."

He paused, no doubt in order to allow Hilary to reassure him of his usefulness to the state. She did not.

"My husband flies," said Hilary finally. "In the RAF."

"I shall pretend I didn't hear that," he replied. 

The arrival of their main courses served as a welcome distraction. Scot-Hallard had ordered the Beef Wellington, Hilary the roasted stuffed quail. Miraculously it was more than edible. For Scot-Hallard the fact could hardly be a revelation, but Hilary – for whom meals taken in company with the rest of the hospital junior staff had proved small consolation for the loss of Lisa's cooking – found herself absorbed by her food. 

As he dissected his steak – with a brisk assurance that hardly seemed to require him to look down at the plate – Scot-Hallard took up the slack, discoursing on past cases with a manner that would have needed little translation to be at home with his fellow surgeons on a golf course, in a lecture theatre, or at a medical conference. Hilary listened with real interest, for the demands of her work had given her little time for such indulgences as these.

_Perhaps this won't be so bad after all._

"Hadn't we better talk about you?" he asked finally, leaning forward slightly across the table to emphasise his sincerity. It was, thought Hilary, a perfectly timed transition; from the intellectual stimulation of conversation over the main course to the intimacy of coffee.

"I don't think so," said Hilary, startled. In the moment she could not think there was anything to tell, so used was she to the enforced self-effacement of an surgical resident who exists, in the operating theatre, solely as an extension of her chief.

"This is hardly the time for false modesty," he said, smiling with self-satisfaction. "I take an interest."

It was as though they were playing chess and he were congratulating himself upon having anticipated and countered a rather conventional move. Hilary, who had not played chess since she was a girl – taught by her eldest brother, Sam's father, she had never been allowed to win and had concluded as a result that she lacked talent – found herself at a loss.

"If you've any doubts," Scot-Hallard continued, "rest assured that not a trace of what passes between us tonight will make its way into theatre tomorrow. I keep my work and play strictly separate. Tonight I appear before you a mere civilian."

Having had some moments to gather her wits about her, Hilary felt somewhat better. In order to win another few seconds she lit a cigarette. "That's unfortunate," she said, "because I'd rather been hoping to hear about your research."

The hints from de Groot had not been enough for her to determine whether Scot-Hallard's Ministry of Defence connections were a _de facto_ open secret, or whether there was in fact something to be kept hidden. It seemed to her worth testing – perhaps it was the wine – how far the deniability of the evening would stretch. If he balked she could always fall back upon his attempted land grab in the Path Lab, which was already the talk of the hospital. 

(Her initial judgment that he was not an innovator had clearly been an underestimation of the man. Unusually, for a surgeon of his gifts, his interests lay mainly outside the theatre.)

"You need only have asked," Scot-Hallard replied with a display of conscious gallantry.

In the end he told her far more than she had expected. If she had been a German spy she would have done very well out of his tale of the chemical warfare experimental station to which he had been seconded as an investigator; the initial animal trials; the promising secret gas for which, unfortunately, an effective countermeasure had come to light; and the frustrations of the internal politics which had brought his further research to a standstill.

"Without the data from human subjects it was useless to go any further," he concluded. "There's not the will in this country; things are different in America, no doubt. After that there seemed no point in remaining when my contributions were clearly unwelcome. So I came to Bridstow."

Hilary kept her face impassive. Somewhere in her brain, the lines of _Dulce et Decorum est_ ran implacably onwards. She was annoyed with herself for the sentimentality, for the poem had become a cliché years ago, and it was a bullet which in the end had done for her brother. 

She was intimately and professionally familiar with the obscenity of cancer; one could not imagine that the effects of chlorine gas had been any worse. And allowing any show of squeamishness in front of Scot-Hallard would be unthinkable. 

She was, in fact, not squeamish. She would have treated such injuries without hesitation. It was just that she would not willingly have inflicted them.

Pondering this distinction, Hilary lit a cigarette and allowed Scot-Hallard to pour her another glass of wine.

"You can't harm a man, you know, with something that doesn't affect him in the least." 

Scot-Hallard's observation was delivered so naturally, and so much as a part of an ongoing conversation, that for a brief, confused moment she assumed that he was still discussing chemical warfare. This incorrect impression was dispelled when Scot-Hallard, replacing the bottle of wine on the table, allowed his hand to brush hers. He looked at her questioningly.

"It would affect me," said Hilary finally, "whether or not it involved Julian."

"If you'd rather omit the love affair, I shall understand entirely; you'll find me perfectly amenable. If you prefer we could confine it to a single night and leave it at that. Although I can't offer testimonials, I'm told that my technique is top-notch. And incidentally I've never landed a woman with a bastard."

The message that he did not intend to marry her – whatever the circumstances – could not have been more prettily put. Hilary, who did not intend to be landed with a child – whatever the circumstances – suppressed a smile.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "It would be wrong all the same."

"The knowledge of good and evil," replied Scot-Hallard, "is an observed phenomenon, attendant upon a certain condition of the brain-cells, and is removable."

Hilary might have been more shocked by this pronouncement were it not for the tone in his voice: he handled the sentence delicately, at a distance, as if with forceps.

Though she did not like to admit her ignorance, she liked still less to remain ignorant. "What is that from?"

"Sir Julian Freke," came the ready answer. " _Physiological Bases of the Conscience_."

The name was vaguely familiar to her. She racked her brain, trying to remember in which text she had encountered it. David would have had no trouble; his memory was nearly photographic.

_A fine showing,_ she thought, putting a cigarette to her lips and inhaling deeply. _What chance have you at passing your Fellowship if you can't even..._

Then it struck her, from an angle she had never anticipated.

"That murder at St. Luke's, one of Lord Peter Wimsey's cases... Didn't he hang for it?"

Scot-Hallard looked delighted, as though she had successfully preceded him to an obscure diagnosis. "Indeed he did. One suspects that some sort of organic deterioration must have been at the root of it. I've always wondered whether he knew, subconsciously; there can be no other excuse for his having written a Times Book Club selection."

The case, involving the unwitting dissection of the victim by the students of the murderer, had happened while Hilary was still at university, and she had paid it little attention then. It had, however, still been the talk of gross anatomy when she began her studies.

Another association occurred to her; she remembered someone saying that Scot-Hallard had been at St Luke's. "Did you know him?"

"He was my chief. Thankfully a few years before the mental break. His theory was sound, however questionable the practice; the papers on shell-shock are well worth reading. But all that is by the by. You haven't answered my question. Will you join me upstairs later on?"

Hilary's first instinct was to burst out laughing. She had never before been propositioned so bluntly, not even by David. It was as if, after thoroughly enjoying the game over dinner, he had now reverted to the habitual impatience of expression that marked his manner in theatre. Perhaps for this reason – or perhaps because she felt that she had answered his question already – she responded with equal bluntness.

"No. It's been an excellent dinner, and I'm very flattered. But I can't; it isn't the way I'm made. I'm sorry."

He now appeared, not charmed, but mildly irritated. "I don't believe in _can't_."

This comment attempted to retain the veneer of flirtation, but it was a thin one.

"I do, I'm afraid; I'm a realist."

This struck home; for, in countering Hilary, Scot-Hallard would have to implicitly range himself with the romantics. This he was apparently not willing to do.

"In which case, if you like, I'll drive you home," he said, signalling quickly for the waiter.

"Thank you," said Hilary. "That would be good."

He paid, got up from the table, and escorted her out of the inn, all with a certain mechanical air that suggested his mind was elsewhere. By the time they were crunching across the rain-damp gravel of the drive, he seemed to have collected himself once again.

"I wouldn't like you to leave with any doubt in your mind," he said, unlocking the car door and handing her in. "This will be forgotten tomorrow, and have no bearing upon either of our professional lives."

From the mouth of another man, a comment such as this – drawing to her attention the trouble he could make for her if he chose, the power of life and death he held over her career – would have seemed in the nature of a veiled threat. But Scot-Hallard was, as far as she could tell, perfectly sincere.

It occurred to Hilary that, in his way, Scot-Hallard was a man of honour. Although his bohemian private life would hardly win him the approval of the world at large, he lived according to his own lights, and was scrupulous of his conduct within them. To him, his affairs were a game in the highest sense of the word – rigorously conducted according to the rules he laid down for himself and, as all good games were, against an opponent who shared his understanding and respect for them.

Looking upwards towards the comfortably lighted rooms of the inn, Hilary felt a momentary pang at the thought of going home to her cold and lonely flat. She wondered, watching as he shifted the car into gear, whether he were the same in bed as he was in theatre: quick, practiced, thorough, and without wasted effort.

There was no point in wondering. If he were, she would never get the benefit of it – and, in the end, Julian or no Julian, she would not have wanted to.

Still, as they drove back to Bridstow through the silent country lanes, she found herself thinking regretfully of the path not taken.

***

Next morning, as she opened her eyes and looked at the summer sunlight painting its way across her ceiling, she wondered what on earth she had been thinking.

Scot-Hallard's assurances of discretion seemed distinctly more hollow in the light of day, without half a bottle of wine to lend her fortitude. Hilary winced, distinctly dreading the thought of meeting his gaze at rounds.

But there was nothing for it. By the time that she was at the hospital, pulling on her white coat in the changing room, she was thinking already of one of the cases she would be presenting, a post-surgical infection which was, infuriatingly, not responding to the usual course of sulfanilomide. Her answer to this question seemed, as she walked down the hallway to the ward, ever more urgent – and the questions of the previous evening fading away into a tattered and half-remembered dream.

As ever, Scot-Hallard arrived for his rounds one minute early. One could have set one's watch by it. He gave Hilary a minute, sidelong, impersonal glance, as though he were checking over a surgical tray for the presence of an instrument necessary to his work. Ensuring that it had been sterilised of all contaminating associations.

"Mrs Fleming," he said briefly, acknowledging her presence.

"Mr Scot-Hallard," she replied.

Perhaps there was a small part of her, the woman beneath, that revolted at such treatment. But Hilary Mansell, MRCS, Registrar at the Bridstow City Hospital, could not give it any credence. If her chief chose now to view her now as a doctor rather than a woman, should she not be grateful? Was this not what she had wanted all along?

Hilary took a deep breath and followed her chief into the ward.


	4. Chapter 4

That summer was all change at the City Hospital, as summers in hospitals always were.

To no one's surprise, De Groot was on his way to a registrarship at Guy's. He had taken his round of congratulations with a becoming insouciance; one might say this was fitting, given that his father's connections had made the post a certainty, but the infuriating fact from Hilary's point of view was that he deserved it.

Sitting in the stuffy, windowless examining room that served her as a makeshift office, with a stack of under-revised texts piled on the desk in front of her, she attempted to calm her mind and turn the few moments she possessed before the start of rounds back to her studies. It was impossible. 

If he had been incompetent, a time-server, a wastrel, she could have hated him, resented his father's influence and the archaic traditions that meant that not even a woman medical student could get a look in at Guy's, much less a qualified surgeon who possessed the effrontery to be married as well as female.

But, as De Groot deserved his every privilege, she could hardly despise him for them. It had been the same with David.

 _Perhaps it's not worth it,_ she thought, looking hatefully at the serried books filled with a clutter of paper scraps, the place-markers and scribbled notes that David had always despised as superfluous. _What am I trying to prove, after all? Julian doesn't care; Julian wouldn't care if I gave up working entirely. What was the point of leaving Gloucestershire only to have it end like this? Why should I make myself suffer?_

It seemed to her that winning would prove nothing and losing would only drive home a fact that she had, for years, striven to avoid. But, if it were true, perhaps it was finally time to accept it. All her efforts would only have served to delay the inevitable.

She opened the nearest volume and stared down at the tiny, closely-set print on the onionskin page. For a moment the text, swimming in front of her eyes, seemed almost meaningless. She might have been back in French class at school, addressed in a language that she had been learning for the past four years and hearing nothing but so much gibberish. She slammed the book shut once again and lit a cigarette instead.

A young woman put her head around the door which Hilary had failed to close. She was in mufti, a navy silk dress sprigged with white flowers which looked enviably cool in the heat. She wore red lipstick and the dark curls of her hair swung loose about her chin.

"Yes?" snapped Hilary. "If you're wanting the ward sister, she's down the hall. But visiting hours are over."

"I'm not here for visiting hours," said the young woman firmly. "I'm looking for the registrar, Fleming. Is he..."

Hilary lost the remainder of the sentence in a fit of white-hot rage. Civilisation and education had left her too repressed to scream. She could only draw savagely on the cigarette and exhale her anger into the already close fug of the small room.

"Treviss," the girl continued. "Emilia Treviss. I'm his new house surgeon."

"Oh, are you?" said Hilary. "I'm the registrar here. Hilary Fleming. Mrs."

She had, she realised, never before emphasised her married title with such conviction.

The two women stared at one another in dawning horror.

"No one said," began Miss Treviss hotly. "They just sent me up..."

In both senses of the expression. No doubt someone had thought it amusing to leave her initial error uncorrected.

"I hope," replied Hilary, "that you don't make as many assumptions in your diagnoses."

"It has nothing to do with my diagnostic skills."

 _How awful,_ thought Hilary. _I suppose they gave her to me because they thought that we would understand one another, or something like that._

It was not as if she were unused to working with women. Apart from the usual monstrous regiment of matrons, sisters, nurses, midwives, physios and the like, she had been part of a very average class of medical students whose female contingent had been swollen in number by the continued refusal of the London medical schools to re-open their hallowed doors to such. Yet having been the only woman that year to be kept on, and the first woman on Sanderson's firm, she had to a certain extent become removed from those circles. In fact she had taken a healthy pride in the fact, thinking that she had been entirely right not to turn to one of the women's hospitals.

Since she had lost out on the post to David, the regular circulars from the Medical Women's Federation had seemed to carry with them a sting of injured pride, and she had deposited them in the bin unread. Now the notion that her chief had thought her sex would mark her out for some kinship with this woman whom she did not know from Adam seemed the worst sort of affront.

Hilary took a deep breath, holding her cigarette off to the side this time. One was meant to be the bigger person after all.

"Well, that remains to be seen," she said. "But welcome to Bridstow. Go and find the ward sister – she's down the hall, as I said – and ask her to show you around. Be certain you're back before rounds at nine. Scot-Hallard waits for no man."

 _Or woman,_ she added mentally.

"Of course, Mrs Fleming," said Treviss, sounding now as if she were making a conscious attempt to rein in her temper, and to sound like the respectful house surgeon of a busy registrar. "Thank you."

Hilary, against her will, found herself beginning to like the girl.

***

Before rounds began Hilary was waiting on the landing, hoping to catch Scot-Hallard before he entered the ward. True to form he came upstairs taking the steps two at a time. She caught him by the sleeve before he could nod and pass her by.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

A charming smile spread across his face. 

"Tell you what?" he said. Despite his words he clearly felt no confusion whatsoever. "Was there anything to tell? She's very promising. Came to us from the Clyde Summers; has her MRCS and two years as a house surgeon there."

Hilary was, in fact, looking at herself in embryo. One could imagine the specimen bottled and labeled on a shelf of the Hunterian. _Woman surgeon: spontaneous abortion._

"She'll think she knows everything already," she said.

He smiled again. "Then it's your job to show her she doesn't."

Hilary suspected that her chief had known exactly what he was about, bringing Emilia Treviss onto the firm. Putting the cat amongst the pigeons. Despite what he had said to Carter a few weeks ago, she furthermore suspected that the man actually liked women. This, from a well-respected consultant surgeon, was shocking, almost heretical. Perhaps, thought Hilary, one could consider it an obscure _genus_ of fetish.

"Rounds, Mrs Fleming?" added Scot-Hallard.

He gestured for her to proceed him and they entered the ward together.

After the excitement of Dunkirk, things had quieted down on the men's surgical ward. The scattering of military patients that remained had merged insensibly into the general population, so that, from day to day, one did not necessarily consider whether a particular stripe had been earned on the factory floor or on the beaches of France. (The injuries were, in general, distinctive; but this was beside the point.)

Only a few specific cases now stood out in her mind. One of those was R.R. Lanyon – _Ralph_ , he was called, though she only knew this thanks to Alec Deacon. He had long been officially ambulatory, which made it no easier to keep track of him; she had glimpsed him more than once alone in the chapel, and did not think it was due to religious leanings.

Lanyon would have been discharged weeks earlier had not his recovery been put back by the orthopaedic surgeon finally deciding to remove the fifth metacarpal after all.

"Treated conservatively to start with," Scot-Hallard was saying, lecturing the new students and housemen gathered closely around him. "Then we concluded that something a bit more wholesale was indicated."

Hilary wondered whether this was a subtle critique of the initial operation, forgetting that subtlety was not a part of his professional style. Weeks ago she had briefly indulged in guilt at her decision in theatre, which had removed Lanyon from active service; but she did not remember this either.

Lanyon himself appeared to be taking as little part in proceedings as possible. To look at him, one would not know that he was ambulatory; like all the other patients he had been strictly tucked up into bed to await inspection, forbidden to move a muscle until the consultant had passed through the ward. Unlike the other patients, he was according Scot-Hallard a rigid _eyes-front_ , as though any violation of the hospital code of impersonality would attract punishment or physical pain. To Hilary he gave no sign of recognition or acknowledgment.

"Who would like to examine the patient? Miss Treviss, come forward if you will."

Emilia Treviss forced her way forward through the crush of bodies surrounding the bed. Distracted by the small bustle of rearrangement, Hilary might have missed the sharp uplift of Lanyon's straw-coloured eyebrows, or put Miss Treviss's brief hesitation before lifting his hand from the counterpane down to an understandable tentativeness in her new post. As it was she did not know what to think. Someone less familiar with the symptoms might have put Lanyon's surprise down to her gender; but Hilary, who had observed every possible variety of that particular reaction, did not think it was this.

Whatever the explanation, it did not stop Emilia Treviss from offering a competent, telegraphic synopsis of the condition of the hand, with an equally competent digression, when prompted, on the course of sulfa she would have ordered.

"And when will he be ready for discharge?" asked Scot-Hallard finally.

Treviss raised her eyes from the patient in surprise. "I should say he's ready now."

"Quite right," replied Scot-Hallard, who had been engaged in an ongoing dispute with the orthopaedic surgeon over just this point. "Overdue. Tomorrow morning."

"Yes, Mr. Scot-Hallard," said Miss Fisher, the ward sister, whose responsibility it would be to organise the discharge.

All the onlookers began to turn away as soon as their chief did. It was only Hilary, lingering with her thoughts, who saw Lanyon pass a hand – his right hand – across his brow. He glanced up at her, lifted his eyebrows yet again, and favoured her with a mimed ' _phew_!' Hilary smiled benignly down at him, feeling herself better disposed to the young man than she had been. Perhaps it was the prospect of seeing his back at long last.

"...Nothing so interesting," she overheard Treviss explaining to the sister as they left the ward, "he was only at school with my brother."

***

The second of the new house surgeons did not arrive until the evening; his car had broken down on the drive south from Sheffield. After one had seen both the car and its owner, this hardly seemed surprising.

Penury had left its mark upon him, the multiply-patched elbows of his tweed jacket and a pinched look in the face speaking of straitened years in bedsit lodgings with a gas ring and precious little to cook on it. Hilary had known such men during her own medical school years – known them, that is, as far as possible, which was to say not very well. They would appear early to every lecture and practical, take encyclopedic notes throughout, and then disappear like wraiths as soon as any academic talk ceased. One never saw them treading the boards at the Christmas show, or playing on the school rugby side, nor even telling tales in the common room after hours. 

For this type, more starkly than most, medical school was nothing but a means to an end. They stinted themselves on sleep and food and shelter knowing that their studies depended on their parents doing likewise – for a scholarship often did little to cover living expenses – and studied for each examination knowing that failure would mean descent into the abyss of the lower middle classes, clerking or worse.

For Hilary the barriers to medical school had been purely social. Even the income from her great-aunt's small legacy would have been enough to pay her fees; but her parents, once accepting the fact of her studies, had been eager to make her continued student existence a comfortable one, and had continued her allowance with an addition to cover her new expenses.

Her time as a GP in Gloucestershire had given her a more practical insight into poverty; she had found that, after all, she got on rather well with working people, who did not expect the elaborate courtesies that her private patients demanded.

But with a fellow doctor things were different. Young men of this type were so touchy, always expecting insult and reading condescension where there was none. Working with him would be a ticklish task, thought Hilary; she did not look forward to it.

She wondered if Robert Satterthwaite were any more looking forward to working with her.

"But it won't happen again," he concluded, after delivering a very brief account of his disastrous journey over coffee in the ward sister's office.

Another man, thought Hilary, might have dramatised the incident more; she suspected him of not wishing to underline the extreme unreliability of his car. She wondered whether he would keep it now that he had taken the post in Bridstow.

"I should hope not," she replied absent-mindedly. "You'll only be upstairs in the residents' wing, after all."

"The residents' rooms are very comfortable," offered Miss Fisher with a sort of auntly solicitude. A moment later she seemed to think better of what she had said, or perhaps to realise that she was still too young to be entirely auntly (perhaps not quite thirty-five), for she added with some haste: "So I've been told."

Hilary suppressed a smile. She did not find them so, at least not compared to the two rooms she had occupied at Lisa's, which now seemed a dimly remembered bliss. But one supposed that for a young man earning the princely sum of fifty pounds per annum, a small room of one's own with its endlessly banging steam radiator and cracked frosted windowpanes overlooking the courtyard, plus three stodgy meals a day in the residents' dining hall, might seem a luxury when compared with the alternative.

"They're not so bad," she replied. "You won't be spending much time in them, of course."

"Of course not," said Satterthwaite quickly, as if wishing to underline his keenness to get to work. He took one last sip from his coffee cup and looked down at the saucer, upon which only the barest scattering of biscuit crumbs were visible.

"Surely you've time for another cup," said Miss Fisher coaxingly.

One could, thought Hilary, see the new favourite emerging. Miss Fisher had been pleasant enough to Hilary herself – more pleasant than most ward sisters, and positively effusive compared with the Matron at the cottage hospital – but de Groot had disappointed her with his easy self-sufficiency and a taste for luxury that left little time for lingering in the ward sister's office. One could hardly be jealous if she did choose to take up Satterthwaite; one could see that he needed it more.

Satterthwaite cast an anxious look in Hilary's direction and swallowed, revealing a prominent Adam's apple. No doubt he was waiting to see how much of a slave driver she would prove to be. He had, she thought, probably read The Citadel one too many times.

"You've nothing to do but the night rounds," she said. "Stay if you like. If there's any emergency you can buzz me. I'll be upstairs asleep."

Nonetheless, as she left, she felt a pang at forsaking the warmth and company of the ward sister's office for her own narrow bed. There was no one waiting for her; but there was nowhere else to go.

At that hour the hospital corridors were darkened and empty. Even the crepe soles of her shoes seemed to echo on the tiled floors. Unlike some of the other girls at school, she had never been a devotee of ghost stories (either telling or listening), but in such an atmosphere, a distance from the rationality of the daytime world, one could understand why they held such power.

Hilary was surprised to find a light still burning in the chapel, casting a square of illumination out into the corridor. She looked down for a moment; the eerily attenuated shadows of her ankles stretched across to the opposite wall, and their junction with the rest of her shadow.

 _Alice in Wonderland,_ she thought. _'You must be mad, said the Cat, or you wouldn't have come here.'_

Eavesdropping had been no part of her intention. But when she heard the voices in the chapel she knew that she could not have expected anyone else.

"My letter was returned," Lanyon was saying. From his tone it was clear that it had been no ordinary letter.

Hilary felt a sudden wave of fatigue. She found that, after all, she did not want to know. Pulling her cardigan more closely around her, she made her way upstairs to her bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to toujours_nigel for the loan of Emilia Treviss, who appears in [The Thousandth Man](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2759156).


End file.
